How to prepare for and apply to data science graduate schools abroad (with full funding)

On July 27, 2024, the UP Data Science Society hosted a career talk titled “How to Prepare for and Apply to Data Science Graduate Schools Abroad (with Full Funding).” It was the second of two mentorship sessions that month, after the LangChain workshop on July 13. The session was announced on July 25, 2024; the announcement did not give a start time or platform.

The speaker was Dr. John Boaz Lee, a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Facebook, where he works on deep learning and graph-based methods. The announcement introduced him through his expertise in data mining and graph modeling. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and was previously a Machine Learning Researcher at Adobe and Xerox PARC. His work covers ad retrieval, relevance, and user intent prediction, and he holds a patent for his research.

Dr. Lee talked through his own experience as a graduate student in the United States. He explained how to find graduate schools abroad, how to prepare for them, and how funding works. Teaching assistantships and scholarships, he said, are what make an MS or PhD in data science affordable. He also stressed that research skills play a crucial role in securing those opportunities.

Topics covered:

• finding and shortlisting graduate programs abroad
• preparing an application for MS and PhD programs in data science
• teaching assistantships and scholarships as sources of full funding
• why research skills matter for admission and funding

Together with the LangChain workshop, the July sessions paired a technical skill with career planning, so members could see both the tools of the field and a way to keep studying it.